Prime Music – Welcome To India

Music streaming in India gets a new player as Amazon launch their Prime bundled streaming service there.

Amazon launched Prime in India last year to offer free one to two day deliveries for over 100 cities and early-access to deals. Later in the year they launched Prime Video, their Netflix style video streamer, and now they’ve launched their Prime music streaming service which comes bundled with the service.

Indian publication Medianama reported that Amazon had signed deals with the five major labels for India, including Sony. The launch went strangely unannounced by Amazon but brings 2 million songs for streaming and downloading to the region. Prime has been available in India since they released their Echo Smart Speakers in October, but only through Echo speakers. Now anyone with a Prime subscription in India is able to stream from their computers or the Prime mobile apps.

A Prime membership will cost Rs 999 a year, which is equal to roughly $15. It’s cheaper than a number of it’s competitors, including native Indian streamers Saavn (Rs 1050) and Gaana (Rs1020). Western competitor Apple Music is even higher at a price of $1200 a year.

Amazon have launched Prime Music in India within a week of Gaana announcing a $115 million round of funding led by the ‘Google of China’ Tencent. Gaana plan to use this massive round of funding to develop artificial intelligence that can create more personalised services and features.

This could be a sign of increasing competitivity in the region, following the Western world where music streaming has become a battle of the biggest to carve their own unique experiences. Hopefully now that services have moved away from unfair practices, like paying for exclusive releases, the competition will instead breed a drive to create better services with their own USP.